As Torvalds pointed out in 2019, is that while some major hardware vendors do sell Linux PCs – Dell, for example, with Ubuntu – none of them make it easy. There are also great specialist Linux PC vendors, such as System76, Germany’s TUXEDO Computers, and the UK-based Star Labs, but they tend to market to people who are already into Linux, not disgruntled Windows users. No, one big reason why Linux hasn’t taken off is that there are no major PC OEMs strongly backing it. To Torvalds, Chromebooks “are the path toward the desktop.”
You are completely right.
I do also get why the run these commands is a thing, because it’s usually faster and also is distro / desktop environment agnostic.
Why would someone want to write separate guides for Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon etc. when one or two commands will suffice? But on the flip side, my family and friends will see a scary looking command and immediately be put off.
I feel it’s getting a lot better since more apps are just in the browser or electron apps, there’s way way less to actually configure for most end users. The type of people put off by commands generally won’t go digging through the settings anyway.
I do wish there were a proper GUI for configuring GRUB though. Any that I’ve ever found seemed to fall out of date very quickly.
“But on the flip side, my family and friends will see a scary looking command and immediately be put off.”
More to that… these are exactly the people we have all been telling “If you see someone on the internet telling you ‘type this!’ DON’T DO IT!”
ALT-F4 being the benign one.
rm -rf / --no-preserve-root - not so benign.
I remember a story of someone getting the recursive tag wrong on the chmod command and managed to chmod 000 themselves out of everything on the system… including chmod.